The Ecocriticism Reader

Landmarks in Literary Ecology

by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (editors)

415 pages, paperback, University of Georgia Press, 1996

The essays in The Ecocriticism Reader explore the ways that writing reflects and
influences our interactions with the natural world.

Praise for The Ecocriticism Reader

"A powerfully conceived, intelligently constructed collection of essays. I can imagine few
critical anthologies that would have such wide appeal. It comes at just the right moment
and will find a substantial and appreciative audience."--John Elder, Professor of English
and Environmental Studies, Middlebury College

"The The Ecocriticism Reader is an introduction to the field as well as a source
book. It defines ecological literary discourse, sketches its development over the past quarter-
century, and provides generally appealing and lucidly written examples of the range of ecological
approaches to literature."-- from the cover

Quotes from The Ecocriticism Reader

"What then is ecocriticism? Simply put, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship
between literature and the physical environment. Just as feminist criticism examines language
and literature from a gender-conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness
of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an
earth-centered approach to literary studies.

"Ecocritics and theorists ask questions like the following: How is nature represented in
this sonnet? What role does the physical setting play in the plot of this novel? Are the
values expressed in this play consistent with ecological wisdom? How do our metaphors of
the land influence the way we treat it? How can we characterize nature writing as a genre?
In addition to race, class, and gender, should place become a new critical category?
Do men write about nature differently than women do? In what ways has literacy itself affected
humankind's relationship to the natural world? How has the concept of wilderness changed
over time? In what ways and to what effect is the environmental crisis seeping into contemporary
literature and popular culture? What view of nature informs U.S. Government reports, corporate
advertising, and televised nature documentaries, and to what rhetorical effect? What bearing
might the science of ecology have on literary studies? How is science itself open to literary
analysis?" -- Cheryll Glotfelty, from the Introduction

. . .

"Why is so much recent American fiction so barren? Putting the question more honestly, why
do I find myself reading fewer contemporary novels and stories each year, and why do I so
often feel that the work most celebrated by literary mavens (both avant-garde and establishment)
is the shallowest? What is missing? Clearly there is no lack of verbal skill, nor of ingenuity
in the use of forms. And there is no shortage of writers: . . . It is as though we had an
ever-growing corps of wizards concocting weaker and weaker spells.

"To suggest what is missing, I begin with a passage from D. H. Lawrence's essay about Thomas
Hardy. Lawrence argued that the controlling element in The Return of the Native is
not the human action, but the setting where that action takes place, the wasteland of Egdon
Heath: 'What is the real stuff of tragedy in the book? It is the Heath. It is the primitive,
primal earth, where the instinctive life heaves up. . . . Here is the deep, black source
from whence all these little contents of lives are drawn.' Lawrence went on to generalize:

This is a constant revelation in Hardy's novels: that there exists a great background,
vital and vivid, which matters more than the people who move upon it. Against the background
of dark, passionate Egdon, of the leafy, sappy passion and sentiment of the woodlands, of
the unfathomed stars, is drawn the lesser scheme of lives. . . . the vast, unexplored morality
of life itself, what we call the immorality of nature, surrounds us in its eternal incomprehensibility,
and in its midst goes on the little human morality play, . . . seriously, portentously, til
some one of the protagonists chances to look out of the charmed circle . . . into the wilderness
raging around.' "

--Scott Russell Sanders, from Speaking a Word for Nature

. . .

"I recently had occasion to publish two essays describing the traumatic effects which polluted
air has had upon my wife and me during the past six years, one of my major points being that
we are not 'cardiac and respiratory patients' but normally healthy people whose lives have
been radically altered by industrial emissions since we came to live in the Chicago area.
One of these essays, a brief account of our experiences that appeared in the New York
Times and was subsequently reprinted in other newspapers, brought me a number of interesting
and varied responses from readers. A letter than particularly struck me read as follows:

Dear Sir:
Since all of the environmentalists who worry about pollution are also consumers of the products
of these belching plants (the automobile for instance by which you reach your farm), what
IS the answer. Do we cut off our nose to spite our faces? Do we destroy our economy: eliminate
many necessities of life; go back to living in tents for the sake of clean air? The answers
are complex.

"This was a profoundly disturbing letter. The writer was by no means insensitive to the
problems of our time; she saw that a complex dilemma is involved; and she was obviously very
concerned about the entire affair. Yet her expression 'for the sake of clean air' is a familiar
one and reveals that the heart of the problem has not been grasped. For when she asks, 'Do
we eliminate many of the necessities of life for the sake of clean air?' one wants to know:
what are the necessities of life in comparison with which clean air cannot be regarded as
a necessity?"

"When the writer refers to the 'necessities of life' one must ask what it is that she means
by life, and I am proposing that by 'life' she means her desires and her will; by
the 'economy' and 'necessities' she means those things which support her mind's conception
of itself. There is not a body in sight. She sees steps taken to preserve the environment
as actions 'for the sake of' clean air. She does not see them as 'for the sake of' her own
biological existence. Somehow, she is alive: she eats food, drinks water, breathes
air, but she does not see these actions as grounds of life; rather, they are acts
that coincide with her life, her life being her thoughts and wishes. The purity of
the elements that make her life possible is not seen as a condition of existence. Instead,
the economy, the 'necessities' and not 'living in tents' are what matter. That is
life. Her existence on earth somehow takes care of itself and if it does take care of itself,
then why sacrifice the 'necessities' of life 'for the sake of' the superfluities, like 'clean
air'?

"The pattern of thought which this letter reflects becomes clearer if we make some substitutions:
'Do we eliminate necessities of life for the sake of clean air?' could equally well be presented
as 'Do we give up smoking for the sake of avoiding lung cancer?' since smoking occupies the
role (for those who feel they must smoke) of a necessity of life and 'avoiding lung cancer'
occupies the position of 'for the sake of clean air.' However, 'avoiding lung cancer' can
be more clearly stated as 'remaining alive,' which would then yield the question: 'Do we
give up smoking for the sake of remaining alive?' and in a final transformation we may obtain:
'Do we give up the necessities of life for the sake of remaining alive?' " -- Harold Fromm,
from From Transcendence to Obsolescence

. . .

"What I see as a new 'toxic consciousness' in fiction reflects a fundamental shift in historical
consciousness; for at some point during the Reagan-Bush decade, something happened, some
boundary was crossed beyond which Americans perceived themselves differently in their relation
to the natural world and the ecosystems of the American Empire. What happened, I believe,
is that we came to perceive, perhaps inchoately, our own complicity in postindustrial ecosystems,
both personal and national, which are predicated on pollution and waste. My premise is that
during the 1980s we began to perceive ourselves as inhabitants of a culture defined by its
waste, and that a number of American novels written during this period reflect this ontological
transformation. I shall illustrate my point here chiefly through two novels, Dom DeLillo's White
Noise and John Updike's Rabbit at Rest."--Cynthia Deitering, from The Postnatural
Novel: Toxic Consciousness in Fiction of the 1980s

. . .

"Although Bartram discovered and described a variety of species that were new to science,
his book's greater contribution is the narrative itself--the thoughtful and enthusiastic
account of a person fully immersed in the experience of American wilderness. Indeed, Bartram's
descriptions are so spontaneous and sincere, so precise in the depictions, so reflective
of nature's wonders and of a sensibility capable of appreciating the, so free of the influence
of European literary models, that Travels stands as a landmark accomplishment in American
literature. . . . Bartram's book also helped establish the American genre of the nature essay
that from Thoreau to Barry Lopez, has been an important vehicle for American literary aspirations.
And like his friend Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, Bartram's Travels had
considerable influence upon the literary as well as the scientific minds of Europe. . . .
Bartram's influence appears in the work of Coleridge and Wordsworth and, to a lesser extent,
Shelley, Carlyle, and Blake as well."

"Beyond this sensitivity to interconnectedness, there is in Bartram a strain of radical
nonanthropocentrism which clearly distinguishes him from his contemporaries. The ecophilosophical
metaphysic that informs the Travels is made even more explicit in one of Bartram's
unpublished manuscripts:

I cannot be so impious; nay my soul revolts, is destroyed by such conjectures as
to desire or imagine that man who is guilty of more mischief and wickedness than all the
other animals together in this world, should be exclusively endowed with the knowledge of
the Creator . . . . There is something so aristocratic if a philosopher use the expression
or the epithet of the Dignity of Human Nature. Because a man is viewed in the chain
of animal beings according to the common notions of philosophers, acts the part of an absolute
tyrant. His actions and movements must, I think, impress such an idea on the minds of all
animals, or intelligent beings."

--Michael Branch, from Indexing American Possibilities: The Natural History Writing of Bartram,
Wilson, and Audubon

Table of Contents of The Ecocriticism Reader

Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis--Cheryll Glotfelty

The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis --Lynn White, Jr.

Nature and Silence --Christopher Manes

From Transcendence to Obsolescence: A Route Map --Harold Fromm

Cultivating the American Garden--Frederick Turner

The Uses of Landscape: The Picturesque Aesthetic and the National Park System--Alison
Byerly

Some Principles of Ecocriticism--William Howarth

Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy-- Neil Evernden

Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism--William Rueckert

The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post-Structuralism Meet--SueEllen
Campbell